I have a confession to make: I'm white. I have some Latino relatives on my mom's
side, and my avatar is a black guy, but when people see me, they see a white
guy, and that's really what matters most in today's world. In the past 48 hours, we've begun to have
another one of those ephemeral national discussions about race thanks to
Richard Sherman. A lot of elegant words
will be written and a lot of despicable vitriol will be splashed on our twitter
timelines. And then most of us white
folks will forget and move on, like we always do. It's part of our white privilege: we only
need to focus on race during moments like these, and then we can go back to the
unbelievable luxury of not having it be a part of our daily lives.

Like a lot of other white guys, I've lauded some great
articles written by virtual friends of mine, like Greg
Howard and Tomas
Rios. White people love to do
that. It's conscience-cleansing and an
easy way of distancing ourselves from the vile riffraff whose ugly words have
been held up in almost pornographic fashion for everyone to gawk at and
mock. It also distances us from our
stiff cousins and grandparents who said that Sherman was classless, and those
backwards rednecks who called him a thug (which we all now recognize as a barely-disguised code word), and anyone else who
it's easy for upper middle class suburban educated liberal white folks to
imagine when we proudly think of how progressive we are when it comes to all
things racial. Except, the thing is,
we're not.

Last night in the NFC championship, the San Francisco 49ers trailed the Seattle Seahawks by six,…
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Yes, it's good that we're not in the group of folks calling
Richard Sherman a racial slur, whether directly or in some weird coded language
that fools no one. But, to paraphrase
Chris Rock in a famous routine I don't dare do more than paraphrase, you don't
deserve a lot of credit for doing something you're supposed to do. And not arbitrarily villainizing a
successful, assertive black man falls into the category of stuff we're actually
supposed to do.

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It is impossible to talk about race in this country without
a chorus of white folks loudly proclaiming "I've never done anything
racist in my life," or "I don't judge people on the basis of color" as if that
absolves them of any responsibility for the benefits they continue to accrue in a fundamentally unfair world. But I'm not here to rehash that old
chestnut. No, I'm here to talk to my
fellow liberals. The ones who take the
other side of that argument. The ones
who recognize that every job interview, every seemingly innocuous encounter
with law enforcement, every time a teacher called on us in class, the deck was
fundamentally stacked in our favor relative to our peers. How many of you do something more than what
you're supposed to do?

I'm in an interracial marriage. My closest friend in the world is black. I've always lived in ethnically diverse areas
and identified more with other ethnicities than my own. And, yet, I'm constantly a passive
participant in outright racism. I can't
count the number of times I've been in a bar, at a ballgame, or just walking
down the street and had a white stranger confide some racist comment in me,
like we're part of the same club. It's
varied from outright racial slurs after watching Floyd Mayweather dismantle
Arturo Gatti, for example, to more insidious comments like "par for the course,
huh?" when watching a black athlete enthusiastically and unreservedly celebrate
his victory. My reaction, most times, is
to avoid confrontation. To roll my eyes
or, if the guy looks like he could kick my ass, to smile politely and change
seats at the next convenient opportunity.
It's almost never to challenge the statement. And part of me feels like that's okay,
because it's not as if much of anything good will come of it anyway. But I'm complicit. I'm playing my part in a society that lets
racism be its open little secret.

In a famous 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch, Eddie Murphy
went undercover as a white person. In a
series of increasingly comical encounters, he finds that white people are
extraordinarily generous with one another when no black people are around. It's hysterical, but it's also not as far
from the truth as we'd like to imagine it is.
When I'm out with white friends, or by myself, it's downright common for
white strangers to make comments in front of me that they would NEVER say in
front of a person of color. It's not
always overt racism, sometimes it's just … a little too close for comfort,
sometimes it's that delightfully popular brand of comedy where white people say
racist things – IRONICALLY! – to show that they're not really racist while
still getting a laugh based on a racist conceit. But the point is that, whatever it is, it's
something by a white speaker for a white audience only. Our collective guard is just a bit lower in
that setting.

White people don't like to think they're racist. And the vast majority are surely not racist
in the way that term was meant a generation ago. They don't support segregation or
antimiscegination laws (although they're often happy to make somewhat
dismissive jokes about white girls with an apparent preference for black
guys). But the studies show that almost
all of us – black, white, brown, whatever – carry some degree of implicit
racial bias. Don't believe me? Go test yourself. You might
be surprised at the results.

So, what the hell should we do, unwittingly racist liberal
white brothers and sisters? I don't
pretend to know. To some extent, there's
nothing we can do. Every day we accept
the benefits our skin color accords us, we're in some fashion contributing to
an unjust society, but it's not like we're going to all retreat into the
wilderness and form a new utopian colorblind community. We shouldn't
– for the love of all things holy – become a circa 1990 MC
Serch, showing up at the Apollo and asking if "the Original Man is in the
house tonight." I can't tell anyone what he or she should do, or what the
appropriate threshold is to be deemed "not racist." But we can start with one very simple
thing. We can stop pretending that race
in America is about the people who called Richard Sherman the n-word on
twitter. We can stop pretending that
retweeting our favorite black writers sets us apart from the "bad" white
folks. Let's just own who we are. Imperfect people that are separated from
those we so easily condemn by a matter of degrees, but not in absolutes. The next time you see some wretched racist
tweet, don't laugh and think "what a loser," take a deep breath and say,
"there, but for the grace of God, go I."